Books Under the Blanket (with a flashlight)

Anyone who buys concert tickets these days knows about online queues. If you’re fortunate enough to be on a pre-sale list, maybe you won’t have to wait as long. But the average person won’t hesitate to sit impatiently at their computer or with phone in hand waiting for an online ticketing system to open for their favorite artist. Depending on the popularity of the artist, you could end up 4,759th in line. The platform could crash. The traffic bombarding the site could kick you offline.

I don’t attend many concerts anymore. Corinne and I have been to see Pentatonix a couple of times around the Christmas holiday. While they’re popular, I don’t have to order tickets the minute they go on sale in order to get them. I also refuse to pay the high cost of concert tickets these days to end up in the nosebleed seats watching my favorite artist on a big screen. Or having everyone in front of me stand up when I am too old and out of shape to stand for three hours.

But in the late 1980s and all through the 1990s, I attended a lot of concerts. And buying tickets was an outing in itself. You either called from a landline, redialing over and over when you got a busy signal (if anyone remembers a busy signal 🫣), or you lined up outside the store waiting for it to open. For popular artists, fans often camped out at the store overnight to make sure they were near the front of the line when the doors opened.

Nowadays, though, worst-case scenario is having to set an alarm on your phone to remind you when ticket sales start. Before Corinne went to Liverpool for her spring semester freshman year, I looked up the touring schedule of her favorite artist, Alan Walker. He played a music festival near our house that year, and I thought about surprising Corinne with tickets, but a single pass was $120. He was the only artist she would have gone to see, so I decided to look up his touring schedule instead.

As it turned out, his tour included a show in London at the same time Corinne would be in Liverpool for school. The best part was that the tickets were only £45 each (because it wasn’t in the U.S. 🙄). So one evening, I sat on my couch in a suburb of Chicago, months before Corinne would even be in the United Kingdom, and purchased two tickets for her to see her favorite British-Norwegian artist in London.

In that moment, she had no idea how she would get to London from Liverpool or who would go with her. But she was going one way or another. When she told her friend Jakub about it, he made plans to visit her for the weekend, attend the concert with Corinne, and then continue on his own vacation to Poland. Jakub ended up missing London altogether, however (When Your Luggage Takes a Different Vacation). And Corinne, my brave extrovert, made the trip to London and took in the concert by herself.

Corinne did recently experience today’s version of camping out for tickets. She received an e-mail from Walker World about a limited-edition baseball jersey style shirt. They made only 88 of them. Walker kept the first one, so only 87 would be available for purchase. Corinne really wanted one, but the sale started at 9 a.m. CET (Central European Time). So she set her alarm for 2 a.m. on a Thursday morning to buy a shirt. She got one, and she was glad she set her alarm because they only had XS sizes left by mid-morning.

One of these days, Corinne will go to another Alan Walker concert, and she wants the chance to take Jakub with her. Ironically, every time Walker has played in Chicago, we’ve been out of town. This year is no exception. We’ll be coming back from a cruise on the day he’s performing at another music festival this summer…where a single-day pass is $130.

Near the beginning of the book reviewed below, one of the main characters attends a concert by himself. His uncle buys him a ticket as a birthday gift. Even though he appreciated the ticket, he says that going by himself made him feel more alone. “Going to a concert by yourself is probably the loneliest thing a person can do. All these people—this communal environment—with no one to enjoy it with.” Corinne expressed the same feeling. She had a great time and enjoyed the show, but she would have loved to have someone to share it with.

There’s always next time if we can plan our vacations correctly or plan a vacation to another city for a show. Because camping out isn’t a thing anymore. You just have to know when the sale starts…and maybe set an alarm. 😉

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 Stars for The Anniversary by Alex Finlay

336 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press | Minotaur Books
Publication Date: May 12, 2026
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press | Minotaur Books.

Publisher’s Description

Every May 1st, a serial killer stalks a small town. Every year he comes for them….

On May 1, 1992, Jules Delaney and Quinn Riley hardly know each other.

Jules is high school queen bee in a small Midwestern town when she survives a brutal attack by the elusive May Day Killer—a predator who strikes every May 1st and then vanishes without a trace. Quinn, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, is arrested the same night after trying to break up a fight and nearly killing someone.

By morning, their lives are forever connected.

A year later, Jules is haunted by trauma and guilt, tormented by one question: Why was she spared? Quinn is newly released from juvenile detention and returns home to devastating news—the unsolved murder of his mother.

Over the next decade, their lives are revisited on a single day each year: May 1st.

As the years pass, secrets surface, lies unravel, and the paths of Jules and Quinn draw closer together. Two mysteries edge toward the truth—what really happened the night Jules was attacked, and who murdered Quinn’s mother? All the while, the May Day Killer is still out there.

And the clock is racing toward another anniversary.

************

Main Characters:

• Jules Delaney – starts the story as a junior in high school, a victim of the May Day Killer who was let go, goes on to become a fashion model after high school, has a younger sister Clare
• Quinn Riley – starts the story as a junior in high school, he and his non-verbal younger brother George were raised by their mom after their dad was killed in a car accident, a fight following a concert lands him in juvenile detention and he joins the military after, his mom was murdered shortly after he went to detention, becomes a private investigator after the military, his birthday is May 1st
• Randy Calhoon – Quinn’s mother’s boyfriend, has a temper, accused of killing Quinn’s mother
• Pat Knox – Quinn’s uncle on his mother’s side, moved to Nebraska from Illinois to help Quinn’s mom after his father died, she got him a job at the factory where she works
• Jack Smith – FBI Special agent assigned to the May Day Killer case, connects with Jules and two other victims every year to touch base and make sure they’re safe, Jules thinks he looks like Hollywood’s version of an FBI agent

Trigger warning: implied sexual assault, abduction

I have become a huge fan of Alex Finlay over the last several years, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. His latest novel, The Anniversary, marks what I suspect will be another bestseller by this amazing author.

True to form, Finlay grabs the reader in the Prologue. It’s only about a page long.

“You trudge up the hill along the overgrown path that cuts through the graveyard. The sky is gray, the air thick. It’s quiet, the kind of quiet that comes only before a storm. You find the headstone, wipe away the grime with your hand until the face is visible.

MEGAN TUCKER
BELOVED DAUGHTER AND SISTER

You unfold your lawn chair, position it facing the stone.

You notice a bundle of dead flowers, the skin of wilted balloons, and it angers you that the groundskeeper hasn’t maintained this plot, or any of the others on this patch of gloom on the outskirts of this depressed Nebraska town.

You extract the small, laminated rectangle from your special trinket box. Her driver’s license. You stare at the pretty face, the infectious smile, the sparkle in her eyes.

You close your eyes and you think of her. And you remember. Every. Single. Moment.

Of course you do.

You never forget your first kill.”

I mean…. Wow, what a start!

What comes next encompasses an entire decade told as a series of single days—May 1st of every year starting in 1992. Each year follows Jules and Quinn. While their lives take very different paths, they grew up in the same small Nebraska town. When they each occasionally return home, they inevitably bump into each other. They definitely aren’t close friends, but they never become strangers either.

Jules finds every part of her life impacted by her trauma from the May Day Killer, who for some reason spared her in 1992. Quinn’s life eventually focuses on finding the person who killed his mother. And still tormenting this small town in Nebraska…an annual abduction of a young girl.

I thought I figured it out a little more than halfway through. But Finlay excels at creating a twisty thriller that will leave you rethinking and guessing and reconsidering until the very end. This is no exception.

But with all of the twists and movement of the main characters around the world, Finlay weaves a story of connectedness between the two. While both of them leave their hometown, they still find themselves coming together throughout the years. I really love the way their individual stories play out…together.

The coolest part of the book, though, has to be all of the 1990s references. As an old Gen Xer, I appreciated all the flashbacks to “new” technology that I experienced first-hand when I was just joining the work force. Jules and Quinn are juniors in high school when the book begins, so about five years younger than I was in 1992.

There’s something nostalgic about reading that Christy Turlington and Kate Moss are big names in modeling. I think anyone who lived through the 90s will hear “the unique chime of his Nokia phone” in their head when he mentions it. We’ve all thought we should have printed out MapQuest directions before heading out on a long drive. And we lived through the advent of “those new iPad things.”

It’s these references that remind you this isn’t just a serial killer story. It’s not just a thriller. And the small-town setting slows the pace enough that the reader can enjoy the more normal moments between the chaos that is every May 1st.

This was a truly different “thriller”…in a really amazing way. Don’t skip this one.

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